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  1. Glenn R. Frantz — Animals

Description

Glenn R. Frantz’s Animals is a series of short poems began in 2009 written as “fanciful reference works,” a nonce form that Frantz has refined alongside other contemporaneous poetic sequences (i.e., Saxifrage; List of the Plates; Five False Starts for a Wikipedia Article; and, the Pocket Reference Library collection). The poems comprise a compendium of sorts, each dedicated to a specific animal (badger, camel, mole, antelope, macaw, donkey, cicada, giant squid, termite, crow, horse, seagull, trout, frog, and human). Despite the differences of each animal, the descriptions seem to have interchangeable parts, as if each portrait could be reenacted across the series--suggesting an encyclopedic sensibility where information is unrestricted in an emulation or imitation of note-taking. Thus, the poems are in limbo, stalling out before “factuality”, rolling around together in a feedback state, where depictions never complete in themselves but cohere as units of meta-description.

Although some of these poems have been published in various journals, this is the first time that the poems appear together in the Animals series, as Frantz intended them to be presented. The pdf here includes all of the poems to date, but isn’t comprehensive as the project is ongoing.

More of Frantz’s work can be found at his website glennrfrantz.com.

Special thanks to Lola Galla for the cover photo.

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